At that moment a dog appeared from nowhere (as they do) on the pavement opposite. Catching our eye, it assumed a sociable expression and lolloped towards us as if it was crossing a field rather than a road. At that same moment, a 1963 Ford Cortina hurtled into view (in as much as a 1963 Cortina can hurtle), heading inexorably towards the same spot on the road as the dog. Seeing this, Terri darted into the road to save the dog from the Cortina.

Narrative destiny (a powerful force) took charge at that point. The car-dog-girl scenario – lolloping dog, hurtling car, foolish girl – could only end in tears and although the Cortina swerved at the last minute and avoided Terri, it couldn’t help but find the dog. I closed my eyes—

‘I haven’t got time for this,’ he said, ‘bloody dog, why didn’t it look where it was going? I’m late,’ he added in a very agitated voice, ‘very late.’

The dog, meanwhile, wasn’t agitated at all, indeed so still and lifeless that it could have been demonstrating the taxidermist’s art to the crowd that had begun to gather. Terri started to give the dog the kiss of life, breathing into its big Alsatian-derived muzzle with unusual determination.

‘Oh dear,’ a rather feeble voice said behind me, ‘is there anything I can do to help?’ The voice turned out to belong to Professor Cousins, waving a large duck-handled umbrella about, like a man in danger of becoming a caricature of himself.

With much creaking and straining he bent down next to the dog and tried to encourage its recovery by scratching the coarse hair on its sugar-pink belly while the onlookers susurrated in the background, earnestly discussing the best method of resuscitating a dead dog – recommendations varying from ‘gie it a sweetie’ to ‘gie it a skelping’.

However, having Terri’s vampire breath in its lungs seemed to be doing wonders for the yellow dog. It began to come slowly back to life, starting at the far end with its big tail – like a giant rat’s – which started to thump heavily on the tarmac. Next it stretched its back legs, flexing the abnormally long toes that ended in big lizard-like nails. Finally, with a little sigh, it opened its eyes, lifted its head and looked around. It seemed agreeably surprised by the number of interested bystanders it had attracted and whacked its tail more vigorously so that its audience broke into a spontaneous round of applause at this Lazarus-like recovery. The dog got to its feet unsteadily, like a newborn wildebeest. I wondered if it might take a bow, but it didn’t.

Terri regarded this recovery with a certain suspicion. ‘He’s probably in shock,’ she said, her little white face pinched with worry. ‘We still need to get him to a vet.’

‘You’re joking,’ the Cortina driver said. ‘I had to be somewhere else half an hour ago.’ Terri began to hiss like a malevolent kettle, showing her little pointy teeth. Looking more surprised than shocked, the dog waited expectantly for its fate to be decided between the two warring parties. It was the Cortina driver who eventually backed down. ‘Oh all right then,’ he relented, ‘but quickly then, I’m very late,’ and started ushering us all urgently into the car.

The car – which didn’t look as if it had ever seen better days – was a rusted white, more rust than white. I got in the back, followed by Terri and the dog which scrambled in awkwardly and insisted on sitting between us. Professor Cousins climbed gingerly into the front, behaving as if motor cars were a new and untested invention.

‘A jaunt. This is fun,’ he remarked and held out his hand towards the driver. ‘Professor Cousins,’ he said, ‘lovely to meet you. And you are?’

The Cortina driver answered reluctantly, as if the information might be used against him at a later date, ‘Chick. Chick Petrie.’

‘Call me Gabriel,’ Professor Cousins said, smiling and nodding his head.

‘But that’s not your name, is it?’ I asked, puzzled by this sudden alteration of Professor Cousins’ usual Christian names of Edward and Neville, but he just smiled cheerfully and said, ‘Why not?’ and Chick said, ‘What’s in a name and all that, eh, Prof?’

Professor Cousins beamed. ‘Exactly! A man after my own heart, Chick.’

‘A professor, eh?’ Chick said. ‘Me, of course, I was educated in the School of Hard Knocks and the University of Life.’

‘And I’m sure it was a very broad and interesting education, Chick,’ Professor Cousins said.

‘It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there,’ Chick observed darkly. Terri clapped her hands over the dog’s ears. Chick started the engine and a strange smell immediately began to fill the car, the smell of something sweet but dead – rotting strawberries and decaying rat. Before anyone could comment on this assault to our olfactory sensibilities, Chick drove off the pavement with a jolt and into the traffic with a jerk, without looking to see if anything was coming, resulting in a cacophony of hooting horns following us down the Nethergate.

Professor Cousins gestured vaguely behind us saying something about there being a vet at the top of South Tay Street, but before the words had left his lips we had passed the turning and were accelerating round the Angus roundabout as if we were on the Dodgems. Within seconds we were roaring along the approach to the road bridge. Terri shouted at Chick that he was going the wrong way and he shouted back, ‘Wrong way for you maybe, but the right way for me.’ He didn’t even stop at the toll-booth, merely slowing down in what appeared to be a practised manoeuvre and thrusting the toll money into the hand of the collector as he passed, before speeding onto the long, straight stretch of the bridge. I supposed we were in the hands of a madman. Terri leant forward and prodded Chick sharply in the back of the neck. ‘What about the vet?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with the mutt,’ Chick grumbled, glancing at the dog in his rear-view mirror. It was true, the dog did now look the picture of health, sitting up on the seat and as alert as any back-seat driver. But the smell in the car had grown much worse – a foul stench getting fouler the further we drove. ‘What is that?’ Professor Cousins asked.

‘What’s what?’ Chick asked.

‘That smell.’

Chick inhaled as if he was taking the sea-air. ‘Vindaloo,’ he said. He thought for a few seconds before adding ‘and cat.’

‘Cat?’ I queried in alarm.

‘Don’t panic,’ Chick said, ‘it’s dead.’

‘None of us want to go with you,’ Terri said sullenly to Chick.

‘Kidnapped?’ Professor Cousins said, growing quite merry. ‘How exciting. Won’t we have a tale to tell.’

Terri, clutching a handful of dirty yellow fur in one hand, was beginning to look a little green around the gills. ‘It’s a crime, you know,’ she persisted, ‘taking people against their will. You can go to jail.’

Chick snorted dismissively and said, with a certain personal bitterness, that the people who had committed the really serious crimes (murder, mayhem, et cetera) were not to be found behind prison walls but were roaming free in Brazil, or Argentina, ‘or even Fife’.

‘Yeah, well, I don’t care,’ Terri said, ‘I want out.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Chick shrugged, ‘on you go,’ and he reached over behind to open the rear door, temporarily losing control of the car as he did so.

‘Fucking creep,’ Terri snarled at him and bit his arm. (Which is definitely how accidents happen.)

Chick seemed unperturbed, he had the air of a man who was used to being physically and verbally abused on a regular basis. He simply accelerated even more, patting the dashboard affectionately. ‘The good old Mark 1,’ he said, ‘standard model, 1200ccs of effort, top speed seventy-six miles an hour.’

We reached the other end of the road bridge. ‘The Kingdom of Fife,’ Professor Cousins announced, as if we were entering a fairy-tale country.

‘Heuchter-teuchter land,’ Chick sneered.

‘St Andrews,’ Professor Cousins carried on dreamily, ‘my old alma mater.’

‘I thought you said that was Cambridge,’ I puzzled. It was only a couple of hours ago that he had been deliriously describing May Balls and punting and porters and all those other remote activities of academia that were unknown in Dundee.

‘Did I?’ he said.

‘We’re not going to St Andrews,’ Chick said hastily. ‘I’m not a taxi. And I’m bloody late.’

‘Late for what?’ I asked.

‘Surveillance,’ he said, enunciating the word with a certain distaste.

‘Surveillance?’ I queried.

‘Watching people.’

‘I know what it means,’ I said. ‘I just can’t imagine you doing it.’

He took a card from an inside pocket and handed it to me. Grubby and badly printed, it read ‘Premier Investigations – all work undertaken, no questions asked’. Chick, it turned out, was (of all unlikely things) a private detective.

‘A private eye,’ Professor Cousins said thoughtfully.

Chick ignored him and looked at his watch agitatedly. ‘I’m going to bloody miss her.’

‘Who exactly are you watching?’ Professor Cousins asked.

‘Some woman,’ Chick said, ‘jealous spouse, usual thing.’ He lit a cigarette (terrifying to observe at speed). ‘Husband’s a nutter, of course,’ he said; ‘they always are.’

‘You don’t have any qualms then,’ Professor Cousins asked Chick, ‘about doing this sort of work, I mean, ethical qualms.’

‘Qualms?’ Chick echoed. ‘Qualms? How?’

Professor Cousins laughed. ‘The more you say it the more ridiculous it sounds. It’s often the way with words, isn’t it? Qualms comes from the Old English, Chick – murder, torment, death.’

‘Fascinating, Gabriel,’ Chick said in such a neutral tone that I couldn’t tell whether he meant it or not.

I leant forward to speak to him and got a whiff of his middle-aged aroma – Old Spice, sweat and stale eighty-shilling ale. Professor Cousins, I couldn’t help but notice, smelt vaguely of attar of roses.

‘Are you following me?’ I asked Chick.

He raised a pair of amazed eyebrows so that his forehead made a rubbery concertina and said dismissively, ‘Why on earth would I be following you?’

‘The poor girl thinks someone’s following her,’ Professor Cousins said helpfully.

Chick cast a speculative glance at me in his rear-view mirror and said, ‘Do you?’

‘I’m just imagining it,’ I said because I really didn’t want to think otherwise.

‘Poor Christopher – Dr Pike – thought he was being followed,’ Professor Cousins sighed, ‘and look what happened to him.’

‘What happened to him?’ Chick asked after a while when Professor Cousins didn’t elaborate.

‘He had an accident, like our friend here,’ Professor Cousins said, indicating the dog in the back seat who cocked an ear to show he knew he was being talked about.

‘And you don’t think it was an accident?’ Chick said; and Professor Cousins laughed and said, ‘Oh, I’m sure it was, the members of my department are notoriously accident-prone. At any one time half of them are in hospital. There won’t be anyone left in the actual university soon.’

‘Professor Cousins thinks someone is trying to kill him,’ I told Chick.

‘You make a great pair,’ Chick said sarcastically, ‘the man who thinks someone’s trying to kill him and the girl who thinks someone’s watching her. And as for Little Miss Sunshine back there . . . You know what they say, don’t you?’ he said to Professor Cousins.

‘No, what do they say, Chick?’

‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’

‘Far enough,’ Chick said enigmatically.

‘More or less,’ Chick said.

‘How do you know you haven’t missed her?’ Terri asked, reviving a little now that we were stationary.

‘I don’t,’ Chick said.

‘Aren’t you supposed to have flasks of hot soup?’ I said to him, ‘and crossword puzzles, and tapes of classical music?’

‘How about a camera?’ Professor Cousins asked him eagerly, then added, ‘Or binoculars? A notepad? What about a newspaper to hide behind?’

Chick wrestled a Racing Post out of his pocket and waved it in the air. ‘It’s not like that, Gabriel,’ he said; ‘you’ve seen too many films.’

‘On the contrary, Chick,’ Professor Cousins said, rather sadly, ‘I haven’t seen enough.’

‘Mind you,’ Chick said, after a few minutes’ contemplative silence, ‘you come across some rum things in this job, Gabriel. I expect I could write a novel about what I’ve seen.’

‘I’m sure you could,’ Professor Cousins said, with more encouragement than was strictly necessary.

‘They say everyone has a novel inside them, don’t they?’ Chick said, warming to the subject now.

‘Yeah, and maybe that’s where it should stay,’ Terri growled. Chick responded with something derogatory about students, something to the effect that he was paying his taxes so that we could lie around all day having sex and taking drugs.

‘Don’t think I’m not grateful,’ Terri snapped, and Chick snapped back, ‘Awa’ and bile yer heid.’ The car was too cramped for this kind of behaviour, something the dog understood if no-one else did. It suddenly gave a huge walrus sigh of boredom, turned round and round in an effort to dislodge myself and Terri from the back seat, then flopped down heavily and closed its eyes.

‘It didn’t just die, did it?’ Terri asked, giving the dog an anxious poke. It opened one eye and gave her a thoughtful look.

‘Keep still, will you?’ Chick said tetchily. ‘You’re drawing attention to us.’

‘Married, Chick?’ Professor Cousins asked conversationally after a while.

Chick scowled and said, ‘Who wants to know?’

‘Just asking.’

‘Man about town, that’s me,’ Chick said airily.

‘Oh, absolutely, aren’t we all,’ Professor Cousins laughed.

After a pause Chick said, ‘Bloody woman, bloody Moira, bloody cow. Took everything – the house, the furniture, the kids – not that I mind her taking them, mingin’ little bastards,’ he said reflectively. I was reminded of Dr Dick, whose ex-wife was also a Moira, a self-contained Aberdonian – a research chemist – who had summoned just enough emotion to petition for divorce. That, apart from assonance, must surely be the only thing that Chick and Dick could ever have in common.

With an exasperated sigh Chick put his Racing Post away, stubbed out his cigarette and settled back in his seat, closed his eyes and said, ‘Don’t let me go to sleep.’ Who was it that Chick reminded me of? I wondered.

‘You’re looking at me,’ he said, without opening his eyes.

‘I was just trying to think who you reminded me of.’

‘I’m a one-off,’ Chick said. ‘They broke the mould when they made me.’ It began to rain, heavy drops thudding on the roof of the car.

‘Goodness, it’s raining cats and dogs,’ Professor Cousins commented. The dog’s ears gave an interested twitch but it didn’t bother waking up. I wondered what happened to the Tara-Zanthian stock market when this particular weather phenomenon occurred.

The rain streamed down the windscreen, obscuring the view of the street. Terri asked Chick why he didn’t put the windscreen wipers on. Moving himself as little as possible, Chick leant forward and pressed a button. The wipers creaked into life, moving slowly across the windscreen, with a horrible fingernails-on-a-blackboard kind of noise.

‘That’s why,’ he said and turned them off and closed his eyes again. ‘Now how about we keep our mouths shut and our eyes peeled?’

‘What a horrible idea,’ Professor Cousins murmured to himself. The air in the car was damp and didn’t sit well with the rank smell of the dog nor with the original awful odour which had now changed quality into something woolly and fungoid. I suppose it was a good thing there was no heating in Chick’s car or else new life forms might have been incubated, but nonetheless it was freezing cold and I was glad of the proximity of the dog’s big, warm, smelly body.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any of that waccy-baccy, have you?’ Chick asked me suddenly.

‘No, sorry.’

‘Pity.’

‘We could play a game,’ Professor Cousins said hopefully.

‘A game?’ Chick said suspiciously. ‘How?’

‘How not?’ Professor Cousins said, showing an unexpected command of the Scottish tongue.

‘You mean poker?’ Chick said.

‘Well, I was thinking more of a word game, Chick,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘like “Doublets”, say – that’s where you turn one word into another, “Head” into “Tail” for example.’ Everyone looked at him blankly and he said encouragingly, ‘It’s easy – head–heal– teal–tell–tall–tail. See? You try – turn “Dog” into “Cat”.’ The dog looked up in alarm. Terri stroked it back into sleep. Professor Cousins was puzzled by our inability to understand ‘Doublets’.

‘It was invented by Lewis Carroll, you know,’ he said rather sadly.

‘Wasn’t he the one who liked little girls?’ Chick asked.

‘I am going to Alyth where I shall advertise abominable alcohol,’ Professor Cousins said.

Chick gave him a wary look. ‘We’re not going to Alyth.’

Professor Cousins laughed. ‘No, no, it’s another game; you see you go somewhere and you have to do something using the same letter of the alphabet – I am going to Blairgowrie where I shall brave the braying beasts.’ Professor Cousins tried again, ‘I am going to Cupar where I shall cut cheap cabbages.’

‘Maybe we could just go to Dundee,’ Terri muttered.

‘And do what?’ Professor Cousins smiled encouragingly. Everyone – apart from the dog and Professor Cousins – turned rather nasty at this point, especially when Chick suggested that Terri might like to fuck off to Forfar and do something illegal with a ferret.

Which put an end to the conversation for a good ten minutes, at which point Terri said, ‘I’m hungry,’ and Professor Cousins said, ‘And I wouldn’t mind going to the little boys’ room.’

‘Little boys?’ Chick queried, giving him a sideways look.

‘And it’s uncomfortable back here,’ Terri complained. I imagined that this was what it was like being on a family outing in a car (there were so many aspects of normal family life I seemed to have missed out on). But instead of a regular family – mother, father, sister, grandmother, Golden Retriever in a Vauxhall Victor – I had to make do with this strange patched-up affair with neither blood nor love in common.

‘Anything to eat in here?’ Professor Cousins asked hopefully, opening the glove compartment and bringing out an assortment of objects – a deck of dog-eared playing-cards adorned with photographs of big women in various states of undress (‘Fascinating,’ Professor Cousins murmured), a pair of handcuffs, a paper bag of squashed fern cakes from Goodfellow and Steven, a length of washing-rope, a large kitchen knife and a police warrant-card that displayed a photograph of Chick with more hair and less flesh.

‘Don’t ask me how I managed to hang onto that,’ Chick said.

‘How did you manage to hang onto that?’ Terri asked.

‘Piss off.’ Chick stuffed all the items back in the glove compartment except for the fern cakes, which he distributed amongst the Cortina’s occupants.

‘So you were on the force then, Chick?’ Professor Cousins asked and then turned round to us in the back seat and grinned and said, ‘A “pig”, isn’t it?’ as if we needed a translation. According to Chick, who didn’t seem the most reliable of narrators, he had been a detective inspector until there had been some misunderstanding over a holiday in Lanzarote that had landed him ‘in the doghouse’.

‘If the cow had kept her big mouth shut it would have been all right,’ Chick said.

The ‘cow’ was now resident in Errol, in a new house, and said house was serving as a love nest for the cow and her new ‘bidie-in’, a gigolo, Chick claimed, whose day job was an insurance claims loss adjuster – a man, Chick reported vituperatively, who possessed a full head of hair and a brand new yellow Ford Capri 3000 and thought he was the cat’s pyjamas. The cow, the gigolo and the mingin’ little bastards had formed an economic conspiracy to bring about the financial ruin of Chick, Chick said.

‘It’s a dog’s life, Chick,’ Professor Cousins said, giving him a comforting pat on his hairy hand. Chick snatched the hand away, muttering something about ginger beer. Chick’s eyebrows, I couldn’t help but notice, almost met in the middle – a sure sign of a werewolf. Or so Nora had told me.

Chick said, ‘Tell me if anything catches your eye’ (Professor Cousins shuddered), and then appeared to fall asleep. Soon Professor Cousins himself was snoring in the front seat. When I glanced at Terri, I saw that she too had given in to her customary narcoleptic state. I amused myself by watching the sedate suburban activity of mothers pushing prams and old ladies sweeping paths. After half an hour, a woman came out of the house we were supposed to be watching. She had nothing of the Jezebel about her, in fact she seemed remarkable, if anything, for her ordinariness. In her thirties, with short brown hair, she wore a nondescript mac and carried a shopping-bag. She looked as if she was off to collect her messages rather than conduct an adulterous liaison. She smiled and said hello to a woman walking past with a Labrador and then got into a Hillman Imp parked at the kerb and drove off. I didn’t wake Chick up. It seemed to me the woman had a perfect right to go about her business unmolested by complete strangers. (Although is there any such thing as a partial stranger?)

Chick snorted suddenly, looked at his watch and said, ‘That’s enough of that. Fish supper, anyone?’ and I realized who he reminded me of. Like the ghost of Christmas Future Chick was a picture of what Bob was going to be like in his middle age.

Chick started the engine and Terri assumed the tense position of a crash test dummy. We stopped at the first chip shop we came to and Professor Cousins said, ‘Oh my treat, please, it’s been such a lovely day out.’

‘Very good of you, Gabriel,’ Chick said, full of bonhomie at the sight of someone else’s wallet. ‘I’ll have an extra single fish in that case.’

‘As opposed to . . . a married fish?’ Professor Cousins said vaguely.

‘Ha bloody ha,’ Chick said, popping a whole pickled egg in his mouth.

‘Not personally,’ Chick said impassively.

We drove off, slowly as if we were following the hearse, and I caught sight of a sign at the bottom of the driveway, The Anchorage – a home from home for the elderly, and told Professor Cousins that The Anchorage was currently home to Archie’s mother and he said, ‘Really? I never think of him as someone who has a mother.’

As we drove around the roundabout on the approach road to the bridge I saw a hooded figure by the side of the road, thumb stuck out into the rain.

‘There’s no room,’ Terri protested to Chick as he slowed down. The hooded hitchhiker ran towards the back door of the Cortina. He looked like one of those sinister figures from urban myths, the ones who end up killing everyone in the car and then drive off with a boot-load of bodies and pick up a pretty young girl who’s been ditched by her boyfriend and is looking for a ride home, blah, blah, blah. I was surprised that Chick, not overflowing with the milk of human kindness, had stopped but perhaps he recognized his younger more innocent self as the hitchhiker turned out to be none other than—

‘Bob!’ I exclaimed.

‘Put him in the boot,’ Terri said hastily to Chick, but to no avail as Bob was already squeezing himself in beside me, to the particular annoyance of the dog, who could see that there wasn’t enough room for this many bodies in a Cortina. The dog finally ended up sitting on Terri’s knee, although it would probably have been easier the other way round as the dog had a slightly larger volume.

‘What on earth are you doing here?’ I asked Bob.

‘I could ask the same of you,’ he said, unhelpfully, although it turned out that Bob had accidentally taken the wrong bus, believing himself to be on the way out to Balniddrie for a mellow afternoon in the country with Robin and had found himself instead in the more foreign reaches of Fife.

‘Transporter malfunction,’ he said, delving deep into the pocket of his greatcoat and discovering a Caramac bar.

We were nearly over the bridge, the Tay beneath us was the colour of wet slate. Dundee grew nearer and nearer and Professor Cousins sighed with satisfaction and said, ‘Well, what a day.’

‘It’s not over yet,’ Chick said.

‘Church, I think he’s gone to church,’ I ventured.

‘He didn’t seem the religious sort,’ Professor Cousins mused, ‘although a philosophical chap, don’t you think?’

A hearse was parked outside the church; of course they all look alike, but it seemed likely that it was the one from The Anchorage.

‘I think he’s gone to a funeral,’ I said.

‘A gumshoe,’ Professor Cousins said with relish.

‘Uh?’

‘A private investigator,’ I explained.

‘Wow.’

Some desultory conversation followed during which Bob accidentally revealed that he was, to a certain extent, an English student. Professor Cousins was bewildered by this information, never having encountered Bob before.

‘Well, I’m a kind of . . . underground student,’ Bob said, rather unsatisfactorily. We waited another ten minutes and then Terri and I decided to go and find out what had happened to Chick.

The church was Tardis-like, much bigger inside than it was outside, and was full of noises the sources of which were invisible – echoing footfalls and discreet coughing – as if there were people hiding behind screens and in the hollow crypts of the building. The coffin was miles away at the far end of an aisle that was like an airport runway. There was only a handful of mourners, scattered strategically around an ocean of pews, and they all turned to look at us as we entered. We sat down at the back and Terri gave me a little nudge to indicate how happy she was with the venue.

In the absence of electricity the church was lit by dozens of candles. The priest presiding over the funeral was old and bulky, his black priest’s frock stained and strained over a big housekeeper-fed belly. The funeral service was complex and mysterious and seemed to have little to do with the corpse, who appeared to be called ‘Senga’.

On the distaff side of the church I spotted Janice Rand. She was with a Christian friend – an unattractive girl with the beginnings of alopecia and thick-rimmed spectacles. You could tell just by looking at her that she’d spent her adolescence in a church youth-club playing table-tennis and ‘Kumbayah’ on acoustic guitar. Janice was carrying a handbag that looked as if it must have once belonged to her mother. It had a peeling Lifeboat sticker on the side.

There was a knot of old ladies at the front of the church – Senga’s friends presumably – some of whom were clutching shopping-bags as though they’d stepped into the church by accident while out picking up their messages in Littlewoods.

There was an air of palpable gloom which seemed to centre on the coffin. Perhaps when unhappy people die they release an effluvium of depression, like marsh gas. What happened, I wondered, to the molecules of the dead? Do they wait around, to be absorbed into any passer-by? I put my hand over my nose and mouth like a surgical mask just in case I inhaled any of Senga.

The funeral service seemed suddenly to dwindle away into nothing and the mourners shuffled out of their seats and left the coffin to its fate. Janice Rand passed us by without acknowledgement. The electricity came back on, the harsh light rendering the church less attractive.

‘What are you doing here?’ Chick said when he saw us and then looked at his watch and said, ‘Shite – that’s never the time, is it?’ then looked heavenward and mumbled an apology for his language. He made a hasty sign of the cross and rushed out of the church.

Surprised by the haste of his departure, we were rather slow to follow and by the time we got outside Bob and Professor Cousins had been decanted from the Cortina which was already pulling away from the kerb and nosing its way bullishly into the traffic. The dog’s sleepy face appeared in the back window. I almost expected it to raise a paw in farewell but instead it gave an enormous yawn, exposing surprisingly wolfish teeth.

‘I’m off,’ Bob said, and was gone before I had time to say I would go with him.

‘Me too,’ Terri said, hastily setting off in the direction of the Cortina and its canine hostage to fortune.

Professor Cousins and I hung around on the pavement like people who’d been unexpectedly thrown out of a party and were wondering what to do next.

‘Well, I suppose that’s the end of the excitement for today,’ Professor Cousins said, rather dolefully.

I accompanied him back to the university. I watched him walking up the path to the Tower, his back stooped and his legs bowed. He seemed too fragile and ancient to battle the biting winds that howled perpetually around the base of the Tower. He struggled to open the big doors of the building until a janitor finally took pity on him and yanked them open for him.

I trudged home, an icy interstellar wind at my back and a shadow on my shoulder all the way. (‘We know we are sought,’ Archie told me, ‘and expect to be found,’ which I thought sounded quite biblical but Olivia said it was from Dangling Man by Saul Bellow.)